romance
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The Case of Gentleman Jack When the archaeologist holds the remains of past ages, what stories pass through their fingers?The time traveller must borrow archaisms if she is to be heard at all, to prevent time from editing meaning into misread stories, so that others might hear what she heard. She took to a gambol…
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Wandering in early-morning thought, I began to ponder this little musing. We have become sloppy and careless.We have lost the skill to understand poetry,or even to stay with what we are reading and hearing. We speak without thought.We build strong bodies, cultivate minds, and learn to understand our emotions…But where is eloquent language?In what writing…
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The Lady of the Lake Speaks Her wisdom does not allow imperial-minded restriction,where fear destroys what it cannot control,and then calls the ruin protection. To speak of autism is not a story from the Book of Invasion.But a plea to the folk, to educate themselves, to loosen their grip on old beliefs that turn naming…
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Can she still navigate the waters? Or must she learn to trust her inner compass again? Now that she knows the truth, grief follows. Grief for the woman she thought she was. As she revisits old conversations and old silences, replaying social moments with new eyes, wondering what was misread and what was endured.…
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(A Heroin(e)’s Journey in a Neurodivergent Body) Burnout did not ask for permission. It arrived like a storm that had been forecasting itself.Through years of quiet weather reports, the world refused to read. It was not a noble quest, or a choice or a calling I accepted with grace. It was my body saying: No…
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What if “disorder” was only the world’s narrow word for evolution? What is magic in a world bound by the laws of the ordinary mind?It is the colour hidden beneath the black-and-white veil, the secret song smothered by the fear of the unknown. They silence the flowering ones, for they mistake bloom for danger, and…
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Every age needs a monster to chase. In medieval times, it was witches who were marked and burned, as if fear could be turned to ash. In the twentieth century, it was communists, with lists and sweeps that promised safety and delivered suspicion. And now, in the twenty-first century, the sweep is for autism. Presidents…
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The seasons pass as they do, and it flows as time moves. Not in a straight line, though we try to force it into one. Time is not singular; and some days move like a train through space, and it does so, with or without us. Only a year ago, on the equinox in September…
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When A specific burnout hits, the version of me I’ve tried to keep hidden becomes the version people see. The dark side, the bitterness, the self-pity, the sharpness of my words, escape. It isn’t who I am, but it’s what exhaustion distils me into. All the quiet work of editing myself, smoothing the edges, softening…
Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens 